In Black and White

In the old days, Hollywood worked fast; now it lumbers. Nicholas Ray directed twenty features between 1949 and 1963. John Ford made more than a hundred from 1917 to 1966. Allan Dwan (for whom IMDb lists four hundred and twenty-eight titles as director, including shorts) made nineteen features in the nineteen-fifties alone. Even the exacting Fritz Lang made more than one a year from 1935 through 1956. That’s one reason why yesterday’s lament by Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, in the Times, about the dearth of leading black actors in Hollywood is, though clearly well-intentioned, a little beside the point. Things take a while to get through the pipeline of production, and what looks like a trend turns out to be a coincidence. The longue durée encouraged by the historian Fernand Braudel is especially useful when dealing with the modern Hollywood machine.

But look at “The Social Network,” and, in particular, at Rashida Jones. She plays a supporting role as a lawyer—she gives the movie its memorable envoi—and the fact that she is a mixed-race woman is of no significance to the story, which is itself significant. The senior lawyers representing Mark Zuckerberg and his antagonists are white, only one is a woman, and none is young. But David Fincher seems to suggest that this will change in a few years. Only a few years ago, Hollywood wouldn’t have known what to do with Rashida Jones; now she played (and quite well) Paul Rudd’s love interest in “I Love You, Man,” and she’s got more on the way.

It’s a small but significant sign. In any case, stars can’t be manufactured (doubtless to the studios’ dismay), and the fact that no young African-American actors had any major dramatic roles in 2010 will likely prove as anomalous and transitory as the stardom of Steve Guttenberg and Deanna Durbin. Meanwhile, it’s worth looking to the world of independent cinema, which may not be fast, either (there’s often a long delay from completion to festival screenings to acquisition to release), but is at least quick on the draw. That’s the place to look for changes in moods and manners that will soon find their way into mainstream production. (Spike Lee got his start as as independent filmmaker, and his directorial eminence is an important factor—and may be the most important factor—in the increase in opportunity and recognition for black actors.) Barry Jenkins’s “Medicine for Melancholy” and Damien Chazelle’s “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench” present several in a new generation of young African-American actors who should go on to wider recognition. In Matt Porterfield’s extraordinary second feature, “Putty Hill,” which opens this Friday, the casual multi-ethnic community on view owes nothing to central rainbow casting and everything to an absorption in the actual state of affairs in the neighborhood in Baltimore (Porterfield’s home town) where it was filmed.

P.S. I’ll be moderating a Q. & A. with Porterfield at the 7 P.M. screening of “Putty Hill” at Cinema Village on Saturday, February 19th.

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